


Mirror Mirror

by Her_Madjesty



Series: Anastasia - Daemons [1]
Category: Anastasia - Flaherty/Ahrens/McNally
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, Self-Discovery, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-11
Packaged: 2019-03-03 08:23:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13337241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Her_Madjesty
Summary: “What do you think you’ll be?” she asks her daemon in the dead of night, when the room she shares with Maria is lit by nothing but moonlight.“I don’t know,” he replies – he is a ferret, curled around her neck, or a mouse, cradled in her palm. “Whatever you need me to be, I think.”





	Mirror Mirror

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this wasn't on my to-do list. Brief warning for a passing mention of Gleb's father's suicide. Otherwise, hope you enjoy.

I. The Romanov Sisters

Yusupov Palace in the morning is cold baths, folded sheets, and studying Olga’s mountain lion as he lounges at her side while she attempts to do her needlework. Anastasia, her hair still wet, holds his stare and waits for him to blink, casting her own needlework aside to serve as a perch for Raz. She is six, and Raz has not settled, but he plays at being a sparrow in the face of all these felines: Tatiana’s lion glares at him when he passes by, mane freshly brushed; Olga’s mountain lion rests his head on his paws, gaze flitting between bird and girl; Maria’s house cat tucks himself beneath a nearby dresser, pupils dilated and shoulders brought tight in a mockery of a hunt.

The house cat pounces. Raz takes flight. Anastasia whirls to find Maria laughing in the doorway, while, finally freed, Olga’s mountain lion blinks, slow and satisfied. In mid-air, Raz flits from sparrow to raptor, and Maria squeals as he dives, talons reaching out for the house cat that’s turned tail.

(She doesn’t quite feel out of place, this Anastasia with Raz on her shoulder, but she stares too long at her sisters’ cats whenever they all share dinner.

“What do you think you’ll be?” she asks Raz in the dead of night, when the room she shares with Maria is lit by nothing but moonlight.

“I don’t know,” Raz replies – he is a ferret, curled around her neck, or a mouse, cradled in her palm. “Whatever you need me to be, I think.”)

(When the Bolsheviks come, Raz hides in the folds of her coat and uses his sharp minx’s teeth to keep the soldiers from touching them. When Anastasia breaks from her family, falls on the ice and is forgotten, Raz falls, too. They lay in the snow until the nurses find them, and when they wake, he is fluid; when they wake, she’s forgotten everything except the brush of fur against her nose, and there is a quiet voice in her head saying, “It’s okay; I am with you; so long as we have each other, we are complete.”

“What’s your name?” she asks the raccoon-house cat-leopard.

Her daemon blinks. Ponders. Tells her, “I don’t know.”)

II. Dmitry

After the revolution, but before he dies, Dmitry’s father jokes that Elizaveta looks primed for eating. Dmitry stumbles backward, though he laughs, and clutches the boar to his chest – a difficult task, now that she’s grown, a mirror of his own awkward puberty. Elizaveta has no reservations, where her boy has propriety; she shuffles forward, tusks bared, until Dmitry’s father raises his hands in the mimicry of surrender.

He does the same, several days later. Dmitry stumbles into the woods outside of St. Petersburg and pretends he doesn’t hear the shots. Elizaveta walks beside him as they wander, hooves sinking into the snow; she makes meals out of roots and then sits on him, stubborn, when he tells her that they can’t stop moving.

“We do not abandon what we love,” she tells him, but it is not a chastisement. “What will that city be without us, Dima?”

“The city will be the same,” Dmitry tells her, trying to shove her off of his lap. Elizaveta presses her tusks to his chest, and he freezes. The wetness on his cheeks, growing colder with every moment, is more than the boar’s uprooted snow.

“They’re renaming it, anyway,” Dmitry tries to protest. “There’s not a lot of good we can do.”

“Names might change,” Elizaveta says, “but souls do not.”

(Dmitry spends the next dozen years deciding whether or not he agrees with her.)

III. Vladimir Popov

Court is – hard, but it’s also not. Vlad lets Daria wrap her long arms around his neck while he smiles and drinks champagne. On a particularly bitter level, he enjoys the way that the nobles stare at her. She is out of place, a chimpanzee amidst lions and tigers and bears. Her long fingers travel over dresses and into suit pockets; when she doesn’t speak, the others assume that she is no more than a mute animal and that her explorations are a source of amusement.

Vlad leaves a number of soirees with his pockets full of watches, rings, and baubles, all of them due for a selling come the following morning.

And Daria speaks, when they’ve left the parties, when the Neva greets them on their long walks home. She leaps ahead of him, clambering along windowsills and small crevices on buildings with an agility Vlad envies.

“No need to be jealous, Дорогая моя,” she says. “What you lack, I make up for; what I lack, you make up for. Are we not a fitting pair?”

“Of course, dear,” Vlad replies, reaching out to offer her a perch. Daria joins him and presses her soft face to his, better to brace herself against the cold.

They go into hiding when what is Imperial falls out of fashion, though Daria rejects any attempt on Vlad’s part to dress her in a child’s habit; “It’s camouflage!” he insists, all the while trying to hide his giggles.

Dmitry finds them arguing over the state of one of Vlad’s old suits and nearly dismisses them for it; it’s not until later, when he realizes that, in his distraction, Daria has lifted his rubles, that he starts to chase after them.

(“Fool man,” Elizaveta snorts, though in the presence of robber and the robbed, it’s difficult to know who she’s referring to.)

IV. Gleb Vaganov

Iskra matches his father, at first: a wolf, her coat shining in the afternoon sun. Gleb plays with her in the street in front of his home, then toddles inside, snow in his jacket, to find his mother at her books and his father at his gun. It is a reassurance until it’s not.

(The night his father hangs himself, Iskra sheds her lupine form and presses a bear’s wet nose into the crook of Gleb’s neck. “I thought you’d settled,” he whispers in between his tears.

“So had I,” Iskra tells him, “but it seems we are not ready yet.”)

She dances back and forth as Gleb ages all at once; one day a fox, one day a falcon, one day an ill-tempered sheep. When he joins the police force, she goes with him as a hound dog, ears flopping against the curve of her neck.

“She’s beautiful,” Vadim tells him in between cases, his own ferret peeking out from a coat pocket.

“She is,” Gleb agrees, though it’s an absent thing; he doesn’t look at Iskra, but rather Leningrad spreading out from their office windows.

When rumors of Anastasia begin to circle in the square and in the office, Iskra curls up beneath his desk while he paces. “You need to eat, Glebka,” she tells him, her own stomach growling. “We cannot hunt this girl if we do not eat.”

Gleb stops his pacing, and Iskra cowers; the whites of his eyes flash in the evening light.

“You are not a wolf,” she says to him, later, when he’s fallen down onto his knees, begging forgiveness from the mirror of himself. “Glebka, no matter how hard you try, you and I are not meant to be your father.”

“You don’t know that,” Gleb says, staring at his hands. “Iskra, you can’t know that.”

(He meets a street sweeper with Romanov eyes and an unsettled daemon; her amnesia is apparent, even if her soul is not. Still, Iskra scents her with more than just curiosity, and for a moment, Gleb swears that his hound looks wolfish.)

V. Countess Lily Malevsky

Bach does not enjoy Paris as much as Lily does. He preens in windowsills and hisses at the swans swimming in the Seine while Lily primps, readying for a night out at the Neva Club.

“What’s the matter, darling?” Lily coos, pulling her curling iron from her graying lush of hair.

“They think they’re better than us,” her goose replies. “Look at them. Swooning. Mating for life.”

The last bit’s a joke, and Lily laughs long and hard, nearly burning her palm in the process.

They travel together, flitting between Maria’s in the day and the club at night, though for the luxury of it, it’s not all that exciting. Lily eats her chocolates and Bach his cucumber on crackers, and they lounge together, waiting for the days to bring them entertainment.

“We could go, you know,” Bach tells her, one afternoon. “Just move on. Southern Germany, I hear, has a city just like this, except the housing is cheaper and the alcohol is stronger.”

“Nothing is stronger than Russian vodka,” Lily chides him, “and besides, how would we convince her ladyship to come with us?”

Bach goes silent, though Lily can hear his many teeth clicking together. He’d bitten more than a few hands-y Parisians, men and women alike. Lily had kisses their injuries better in response, but she’d kissed him, too, and fed him anchovies until she could smell his breath from ten feet away.

“We could go without her,” Bach says, quiet and full of longing.

Lily laughs again, but there is no amusement in her. “Darling,” she says, pouring herself a glass of wine, “what are we without her?”

“We are ourselves,” Bach tells her, but she is too busy drinking, the red heady on her talented tongue.

VI. Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna

Artem had complained when the gray had first appeared on his muzzle. Now, he looks as though he’s buried his face in snow or in a particularly large bag of powdered sugar. This age reflected in the black bear is not to be found in Maria’s own face. She holds her spine straight in the ballet and in her apartments while Artem suns himself, stretching out his claws just to prove that he still has them.

Any Anastasia – and there are many glowing, beautiful imposters – who sees him and recoils is immediately removed from Maria’s presence.

“They never smell right,” Artem tells her, as Lily drags the latest out by her ear. “I miss the oranges and the childhood. Why do none of them smell like childhood?”

“She would no longer be a child,” Maria says, bringing a hand up to her temple. Artem, watching her, forces himself away from his sunny window and lollops to her side, better to rest his head in her lap like an oversized dog.

“I imagine she looks like her mother,” Maria continues, running her fingers through his fur. “Or maybe Nicholas – she had his eyes, when she was younger, but you never know what time will do.”

“Will we find her?” Artem asks.

The hand on his head goes still. The bear opens his mouth, then lets it close as he recognizes the gentle wetness of tears against his fur.

“I don’t know, darling,” Maria manages to say. “I truly do not know.”

VII. Anya

Her first steps into Yusupov Palace feel like ice water over her head. Anya shudders, and at her side, her unnamed daemon shrinks back. Still, she forces herself onward – hundreds of miles, frostbitten fingers, and a stomach that eternally grumbles have dampened the worry this deja vu awakes in her.

(Or, rather, they should.)

As she curls up in the evening, though, under Dmitry’s watchful gaze, her daemon presses up against her side in the form of a lithe serval. He is shaking, and Anya reaches out without thinking in order to pull him close.

Dmitry’s eyes have just slipped close when her daemon tells her, “You used to call me Raz.”

Anya stills and keeps her answer soft. “Did I?”

“You did,” the serval nods, “but that’s not my full name. I know it, now. I remember.”

Anya forces her eyes open and takes in her daemon’s face. There is no worry in his fine features, but his form dances, flickering between a thousand creatures at once.

“What’s your full name, then?” Anya asks, not expecting an answer.

Her daemon blinks, and then, he is a hyena, gangly and wicked and fierce. Anya fills with longing as he smiles. “Rasputin,” her daemon tells her. “My name is Rasputin."

As a hyena, he settles, and he sends Elizaveta running when Anya throws away her books; he grins at Vaganov’s little police dog, and Iskra tucks her tail between her legs.

(“What’s the matter?” Gleb demands as they board a train to Paris. “What about that girl could possibly scare you?”

“The same thing that scares _you_ ,” his daemon insists. “She’ll be the end of us; you know she will.”)

Vlad, of all of them, has the fewest conflicts with her daemon’s form; when Anya goes to him, sniffling, with Rasputin close behind, he wraps his arms around the girl and watches his daemon attempt the same. Rasputin freezes at Daria’s touch, then melts into the embrace.

“You will learn to manage your fear,” Vlad whispers, voice muffled by Anya’s hair, “for you must be who you are meant to be. You cannot hide from your soul.”

“I’m not hiding from anything,” Anya tells him, her tears staining his jacket. “If anything, I’m trying to be found.”

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you thought!


End file.
